Shubert Seeks Audience, Identity

ON STAGE

April 27, 2003|By FRANK RIZZO; Courant Staff Writer

Trying to figure out the tastes of their target audience has always been a daunting task for theater directors in the best of times. In these days of dwindling state and corporate support, tighter family budgets and competing demands for the leisure dollar, it's Tums time for marketers.

Trying to figure out the tastes -- and identities -- of theaters has also become a challenge for audiences. When the Shubert Theater in New Haven announced its 2003-04 season -- its third under CAPA, the Ohio-based theatrical organization -- it took pride in its stable budget (helped by a $500,000 or so city subsidy), streamlined administration and programming variety. But the Broadway series, at least for subscribers, was hard to get a handle on.

The six-show package includes just one that was even on Broadway, the recently closed ``The Graduate.'' Two other productions with old reliable titles -- ``The Sound of Music'' and ``Anything Goes'' -- will be mounted at theaters in Atlanta and Cape Cod before being sent out to other theaters looking for affordable productions. ``Anything Goes'' will be presented at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Mass. ``The Sound of Music'' (with a promised ``star'') gets launched in Atlanta. Cameron Mackintosh's non-Equity tour of ``Oliver!'' swings around the country and will stop in New Haven but not New York. Evoking the tradition of the Shubert as a try-out house, a Broadway-bound production of a new musical, ``Little Women,'' will play New Haven in the spring. There is also the American premiere of Sir Peter Hall's production of Shakespeare's ``As You Like It.'' That show, which originates in Bath, England, in August, will also play Columbus, Ohio, and Boston.

Please excuse the confusion: A Shakespeare with a pedigree next to a summer stock show? Half the Shubert season -- ``The Sound of Music,'' ``The Graduate'' and ``Oliver!'' -- will also play the Bushnell? (The Shubert gets ``The Graduate'' and ``Oliver!'' right before it goes to Hartford; the Bushnell gets ``The Sound of Music'' first.) One-third of the Shubert season made up of non-musical plays at a theater that for years wrapped itself in the slogan of ``home of the Broadway musical''?

That celebrated slogan caused financial problems for the theater in the recent past. Because its modest size (1,600 seats; and 400 of those are in the far-from-desirable second balcony) the Shubert couldn't afford ever-more-expensive Broadway musicals launching their first national tour. (``Thoroughly Modern Millie,'' ``Hairspray,'' ``Urinetown,'' ``The Producers'' and ``Movin' On'' are all movin' onto the Bushnell with its 2,800 seats or careerbuilder.com Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford with even more seats.)

One of the plusses in such a grab-bag of Shubert shows is that each one may find its audience -- and not necessarily via a theater's subscription machinery, which is traditionally geared for a more monolithic crowd. The new theater-goers may be younger and more diverse in taste, a group that has not yet been served properly. New Haven could be a good laboratory for this strategy. After all, with audiences from Long Wharf and Yale Repertory Theatres -- not to mention those developed from the International Festival of Arts & Ideas -- first-class, first-run plays at the Shubert such as ``Proof'' and ``Allergist's Wife'' proved there was an appetite for more than musicals. So this bodes well for Sir Peter. But summer stock, too? Who knows?

The Shubert is not alone in trying to look at new approaches to attracting new audiences without losing the old. The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford is also grappling with similar issues for its two theaters. But marketers see growth coming not from super-Herculean efforts in eking out a few more subscribers but rather in attracting new crowds for new kinds of programming. If it can at least keep its subscription base relatively stable, the Shubert may just find those new fannies for its seats. It may no longer be the home of the American musical, but at least it's a home with people inside and one that is not being foreclosed.